Chipps shock WCAL, back in race

Published: October 6, 2001 12:00 AM

No one's picking Chippewa to do much, as head coach Nolan Wickard pointed out.

Wickard was shivering as he said it, and that was the body action that said it all.

Had Wickard been dry -- or at least as dry as the occasional Friday night shower would have allowed -- it would have meant one thing.

Since Wickard was soaked, courtesy of his surprising Chippewa football team dumping a cooler of water on him, his words took on added meaning.

Chippewa threw the Wayne County Athletic League race into a 4-team race to the finish after junior Josh Undercoffer scored the game's lone touchdown midway through the second quarter and the Chippewa defense made it stand en route to a 7-0 victory.

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The loss bumped Dalton from sole possession of first place in the WCAL and left Dalton (5-2 overall), Smithville (6-1), Northwestern (5-2) and Chippewa (3-4) all with 3-1 marks in the league chase.

"No one's giving us a chance to win all year ... and that's understandable," said Wickard. "Now we're going to be competing for the county championship the next three weeks.

"We're kind of the upstart," he added. "Dalton's been playing great and we've snuck by people."

While the rain kept the crowd away, it really didn't hamper either team's offense.

"If someone says it was the rain, that's an excuse," said Dalton coach Bob Ramsay. "Our offensive production was what it was almost every night.

"We just couldn't put it in the end zone. We played well in a lot of areas -- we just needed a big play and we didn't get it."

Indeed, two of the biggest plays of the game came in the second quarter when Chippewa's Maxwell Smith read a play correctly and picked off Dalton's Ryan Neuenschwander at the Chippewa 44 and returned it to the Dalton 7 before being driven out of bounds by Joe Pelfrey. That reprieve lasted only one play as Undercoffer shook off one tackle to score on the next play.

"The big play was what he did after (the interception) ... and instead ended up inside the 10," said Ramsay, referring to Smith's pick. "We might still be playing. We might be in overtime."

While those two plays were big, so was the Chippewa defense. Eight times the Chipps faced a fourth-down situation and they held on six of them. The biggest may have been the opening drive of the second half, one that consumed 9 1/2 minutes on the clock. With Dalton at the Chipp 11, Mother Nature aided the Chipps when, on a fourth-and-1 situation, a wide open Dan Owolabi slipped and fell as the ball was delivered, although he almost caught it anyway.

"(Chippewa) made a lot of big plays in short-yardage situations," said Ramsay. "We needed to get those and we didn't tonight."